The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020)

The Babysitter: Killer Queen is the second entry in a franchise that arrived, was mildly noticed, and now returns on Netflix with the weary obligation of a sequel nobody requested. McG directs again, and most of the cast is resurrected alongside the cult that killed them the first time. The story follows Cole, now a high school junior, through a lake party, a satanic ritual, and a great deal of arterial spray. The director has described the film as Faust with Mel Brooks jokes. Faust survives the comparison better.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a desert. The cast includes Latina, Asian, and Black performers in prominent roles, and the film makes no comment on this whatsoever, which is either a refreshing absence of self-congratulation or simply the baseline of a modern ensemble. Race is not a theme. Neither is class, climate, gender politics, or the body. The female characters do the killing and the scheming with real vigor, but the film has no interest in patriarchy as a concept. Cole is briefly believed to have suffered a psychotic break, a detail deployed for plot convenience and then dropped. There is no sermon here, no lesson, no moment where a character turns to the camera and explains how we should all be living.

This is, in its narrow way, honest. The film wants gore, jokes, and a body count, and it pursues those wants without apology. That it pursues them badly is a separate matter, a question of craft and not of ideology. The result is a horror comedy that offends nobody and enlightens nobody, a thoroughly neutral object. Classification is complete. The ledger is nearly blank, and the film seems content to keep it that way.